Everything Bohemian Rhapsody Got Wrong About Freddie Mercury’s Life

By now, there’s a good chance that you spent part of your weekend taking in a screening of Bohemian Rhapsody.

After all, the Freddie Mercury biopic earned the second-biggest start of all time for a music biopic (coming in just behind 2015’s Straight Outta Compton) and took in $122.5 million globally on budget of just $52 million. So, not only did the Rami Malek-starring film make Fox a lot of money, it also had a lot of people paying attention to its version of Mercury and his band Queen’s story.

And while we’re happy for all involved, we have to admit that the success is a little bit troubling. Why, you ask? Well, only because of just how much the film, directed by Bryan Singer with surviving band members Brian May and Roger Taylor serving as creative consultants, gets wrong.

Don’t get us wrong, it’s not easy to take someone’s life, especially one as wild as Mercury’s, and distill it into a easy-to-follow two-hour narrative. But the changes made here, these intentional distortions of the band’s history, are plentiful. And if you walked out of Bohemian Rhapsody taking the film as fact, well, what we’re about to tell you is guaranteed to blow your mind.